It is more interested in signaling than embodying. Cyrus can access the best musicians and producers, and she can register a genuine interest in more subversive art, but few songs on her new album feel like they emerge from experience, or a burning desire to explore new sounds.

The bulk of Gorgeous Johnny is unfortunately too earnest and too patient really to go anywhere in particular, preening like a collection of meticulously cleaned Travis demos or, at their worst, an Adam Green album without any of the dirty bits.

Get Up Sequences Part One is often sweet, but it only rarely breaks the skin.

Alegrias is a pleasant stylistic diversion, another in a long series of non-revelations. That's Gelb's appeal: a guy, a thoughtful guy, who won't press you into adoration, even when he deserves it.

Kings of Convenience would do well to assimilate more of Øye's electronic leanings into their original sound, rather than merely mining sad troubadours past for inspiration and leaving these tracks as sparse source material for the obligatory remix album.

After the Disco is a more cohesive record, and that turns out to be the problem: Mercer and Burton's eccentricities have been sanded down to a single, flattened plane.

She's never been as in control of her voice, an incredible instrument that is as strong as it is attractive. And on The Living and the Dead, it's found just the right setting.

Their songs burst open upon inspection; you must first shrink to their size, but once you do, you'll probably want to stick around for awhile.

Kinshasa One Two is worthwhile both as a cause (all proceeds from sales go to Oxfam) and as an experiment, albeit one that requires some judicious editing to extract the tracks that really count.

Their debut does more than enough to stand on its own, not only ambitious in its own right, but leaving little doubt about Hundred Waters' capability of handling wherever their ambition takes them from here.

It’s fitting the trio recorded it in a repurposed slaughterhouse, because Fall Forever is the work of a band gutting its sound and watching it bleed out.

Fishing Blues’ saving grace, the only song with any real passion and continuity, is one about police brutality written from the perspective of the officer.

Mensa is also writerly. His bars can sound productively picked at and pored over, or clunky and pent-up when overly pampered. The Autobiography splits those tendencies down the middle, casting its star as a remarkable, easy-to-digest rapper with an affinity for half-baked wordplay.

We listen to Weezer in 2016 largely for nostalgic dog whistles. We listen because Blue retreads like "Endless Summer" and "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" offer Proustian pleasures in spite of their obviously-recycled frameworks, and because the simpering, sweet "L.A. Girlz" is the group's best single since "Island in the Sun."

Both Lights may be plenty gorgeous, but in Wyland's never-idle hands, that beauty proves fleeting.

Throughout One Kiss, it's obvious how much Thomas missed writing these stirring, expansive, romantic pop songs for Saturday Looks Good to Me. Even as they sputter through certain emotions, that longing comes through loud and clear.

Those great choruses? Still great, but not when songs are dragged out this long and the payoff arrives right on schedule, about four times a song. It's indulgent, but it's hard to make songs sound this big. Fortunately, it won't be enough to wring-out the magic found in a great many of these songs, and surely won't be able to stall Land of Talk who, with Cloak and Cipher, are progressing quite nicely.

Morrissey has often talked about exaggerating her feelings in song to make up for her youthful lack of experience, but within the lavish Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful is a songwriter whose knack for subtle self-assertion needs bringing to the fore, not dressing up in quirk.

Taken apart from the high expectations set by their debut, Waiting is another strong collection of guitar pop gems from a band quickly proving itself to be a better, more elusive quantity than any easy genre tag might suggest.

In playing it this safe, Summer Camp is just another entry in an increasingly trivial catalog.

Ghostface Killahs is marred by too many tracks that are either curdled by casual cruelty or just tired retreads.

Through all of this chaotic history, DJ Premier is trying to patch together an album that will pass the smell-test, and he does a decent job. Anyone who held out this long for a Gang Starr album will likely be pleased with the results.

[The] Fratellis aren't so much the sound of young Britain as the sound of dad's old record collection.

You can tell that these songs were shaped and sculpted and polished ten times over, the attention to detail and space a welcome step away from the often sloppy clumps of no-fi ruckus clattering up from garages and out of bedrooms everywhere right about now.

As ever, Topley-Bird's voice continues to be a strange and beautiful thing, but it's admittedly less strange and less beautiful when framed against this hopelessly warmed over setting.

Looking like Michael J. Fox clones decked out in garage rock gear, The D4 present aural amnesia with the lyrical complexity of an even less non-ironic Andrew WK.

The formula of acoustic arpeggios, light drumming, tender pianos, and the occasional subtle horn or string section makes for an album that's as slight and gentle as Saltines and mineral water. The boys never deviate from this, and thus Quiet is the New Loud, inane title and all, never reaches higher than saccharine easy listening.

Some may find that the new transparency makes his work a bit pedestrian, the work of another guy with a guitar and a few chords sharing simple sadness. But Ahmed’s senses of song and arrangement remain highly idiosyncratic, where verses spill into choruses and solos in unpredictable fashion.